Microfabricated Atom Chips
Atom Chips are a new and exciting technology that enable the manipulation of atoms close to
a chip surface. These chips combine cold atom physics with MEMS microfabrication
techniques to create electric, magnetic and optical fields to trap and manipulate ultra-cold
atom clouds.
The microfabricated chips integrate optical cavities, electrostatic actuators and current
carrying wires to set up magnetic trapping fields. Besides fundamental physics experiments,
there are a range of novel devices and sensors on the horizon that use this technology. In
prototype devices, atom chips are already being used to make Bose Einstein condensates for
applications including atomic clocks on a chip, atom interferometry, and quantum
information processing.
The talk will describe progress of the design and micro-fabrication of atom chips during a
four year EPSRC Basic Technology project in collaboration with physicists at Imperial
College. The presentation would mainly focus on the microfabrication and design
engineering aspects of these chips, as they almost entirely rely on non-standard fabrication
techniques, which need to be specially developed for these chips. Additionally, they combine
a range of different physical domains such as optical, magnetic and electrostatics, which
makes their design and realization challenging.
Michael Kraft – Short Biography
Michael Kraft is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Nano-scale Systems Integration Group in
the School of Electronics and Computer Science, Southampton University. In 1997, he
received a Ph.D. from Coventry University, “Closed loop digital accelerometer employing
oversampling conversion” supported by Druck Ltd, Leicester. This work produced one of the
first truly digital accelerometers. He then spent two years as a research engineer at the
famous Sensors and Actuator Center (BSAC) in Berkeley California, conducting and largely
managing a DARPA project “Modular Monolithic MEMS System Technology” in
collaboration with Sandia and Analog Devices. In this project, micro-machined gyroscopes
and accelerometers with integrated on-chip electronics were developed, producing the
world’s first MEMS gyroscope using sigma-delta modulation force-feedback control. Since
1999 he has been an academic at Southampton. His main interests include design, simulation
and fabrication of microsystems, particularly sensors and actuators and their control and
interface circuits. His research group was the first to develop a fifth-order sigma-delta
modulator interface for inertial sensors, which can provide significant performance
improvements. He has also done pioneering work on electrostatic levitation and its
application for multi-axes inertial measurement systems. He has authored or co-authored
over 100 peer reviewed journal and conference papers, and two books. He has been principle
or co-investigator of 6 EPSRC funded projects over the last five years.